A24D-02
Surface radiation budget and cloud radiative forcing from pan-Arctic Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN) stations

Tuesday, 15 December 2015: 16:15
3004 (Moscone West)
Christopher James Cox1, Charles N. Long2, Sara Crepinsek3, Marion Maturilli4, Allison C McComiskey5, Nathaniel Miller6, Elena Konopleva-Akish7, Vasily Yu. Kustov8, Matthew Shupe1, Konrad Steffen9, Diane Stanitski5, Sandra Starkweather2, Robert S Stone10, Taneil Uttal5 and Von Patrick Walden11, (1)CIRES/NOAA, Boulder, CO, United States, (2)Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Boulder, CO, United States, (3)CIRES, Boulder, CO, United States, (4)Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz-Center for Polar and Marine Research Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany, (5)NOAA Boulder, Boulder, CO, United States, (6)Space Science and Engineering Center, Madison, WI, United States, (7)Science and Technology Corporation, Boulder, CO, United States, (8)Arctic & Antarctic Research Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia, (9)WSL Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf, Switzerland, (10)Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, (Retired), Boulder, CO, United States, (11)Washington State University, Pullman, WA, United States
Abstract:
Monitoring and forecasting of the seasonal melt of snow and ice in the Arctic is a priority need as Arctic climate changes and the number of stakeholders increases. Seasonal snow and ice melt represent the largest annual perturbation to the surface net radiation budget. Radiative interactions between clouds, the surface and the atmosphere play an important role on scales of minutes to decades, but models insufficiently represent cloud properties. Furthermore, the surface radiation budget is not directly observed from satellite platforms. Direct observations from the surface must therefore be used to document the physical and correlative relationships between variables, and to provide a baseline target for data sets with more comprehensive spatial representation.

High-quality, continuous, long-term observations of radiative fluxes are collected from land stations surrounding the Arctic Basin as part of the Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN). The International Arctic Systems for Observing the Atmosphere (IASOA) facilitates international collaboration amongst station scientists and other topic experts for the purposes of streamlining pan-Arctic synthesis studies. The IASOA Radiation Working Group is currently analyzing the data acquired from Barrow, Alaska (1993-2015), Alert, Canada (2004-2014), Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard (1993-2015), Eureka, Canada (2007-2015), and Tiksi, Russia (2011-2015). The measurements include upwelling and downwelling longwave and shortwave fluxes, as well as direct and diffuse shortwave flux components, and surface meteorology. The observations are post-processed using the Radiative Flux Analysis (RFA) method, which, in addition to basic quality control, provides value-added metrics such as cloud radiative forcing (CRF), optical depth, and fractional sky cover. Here, we present a spatial and temporal analysis of the surface radiation budget and calculated variables from the pan-Arctic BSRN stations. Particular attention is given to inter-site variability of seasonal cycles in CRF and associated relationships with surface albedo and cloud macrophysics.

<< Previous Abstract | Next Abstract >>